Page 447 - Week 02 - Tuesday, 19 February 1991
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MR CONNOLLY: Quite accurate, though, as the Leader of the Opposition points out. Mr Collaery alluded yet again in his remarks to some points of Australian political history. In a previous set of remarks he produced, as his trump card, the Australian Encyclopaedia - which is an august publication, for its purposes - to try to suggest that the Labor Party, in its formative years, self-selected candidates. We found this other extraordinary statement in the parliamentary transcript, which is now tabled, where Mr Collaery explained to a clearly incredulous Senator Schacht that the Residents Rally ticket for the last election was self-selected; that community leaders could sort of emerge from the woodwork and self-select themselves in an order of preference. Mr Collaery seemed to suggest - or did, indeed, assert - that that was similarly the case with the Labor Party in its formative years.
He then read from the Australian Encyclopaedia a long passage on the formation of the Labor Party which, while interesting and inspiring, was, of course, totally irrelevant because it said nothing of the sort. I commend Mr Collaery for reading on the subject of the history of the Labor Party. It is the Labor Party's centenary year and Mr Collaery would learn a lot by studying the Labor Party deeply. He may even begin to take a more sensible approach to policy issues. But I would refer him in particular to probably the seminal work on the early emergence of the Labor Party in New South Wales, which is where the party first emerged, Bede Nairn's work, Civilising Capitalism. I know that this book must, at face value, be regarded as suspect because it is printed in the same colour pink as the Residents Rally policy document, and we have learned through bitter experience to be very wary of that particular document. But I am reassured by the knowledge that Professor Nairn's book was published in 1973, well before the Residents Rally had ever been dreamed of. So I am sure that the pinkness of the cover bears no relationship to the accuracy of the material therein contained.
The point is that in his fourth chapter, where he traces the early emergence of the Labor Party in New South Wales, he makes the point that in February 1891 the Trades and Labor Council had formed the charter of Labor Electoral Leagues, and they were commissioned to - and this is a quote from the Trades and Labor Council minutes of the day:
draft a scheme for government of [the] leagues ... to provide that [they] shall have control of their own funds, select their own candidates in each electorate, and generally to conduct their own business ...
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